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According to the Hartford Courant, 65 percent of high school students admitted to seriously cheating on exams, and 57 percent confessed to plagiarism during a national survey of more than 25,000 high school students from 2001 to 2008.

If teachers and students work together to address the issue and form an academic integrity policy, professor Jason Stephens said, kids could focus more on learning a concept than on getting good grades and a high GPA. “Virtually all of them are cheating because the pressures of having good grades is extraordinary, more so now today than 20 to 30 years ago,” he told the Courant.

Nevada educators have had firsthand experience in seeing how students respond to academic pressures. For 2007, Nevada school officials reported a slight increase in cheating on a proficiency exam that determines whether a student graduates from high school. Kids had started using text messages and other means of cheating on the exam. “When kids get to the point that graduation depends on them passing, they get worried and desperate, unfortunately,” Sue Daellenbach, academic manager for the Clark County School District, told the Las Vegas Sun.

Even in other countries, cheating has drawn media attention. Egyptian officials recently jailed 14 people for participating in a plot to reveal the details of the country’s equivalent of the SAT test. Parents, school officials, and even a policeman were involved in buying and selling advance copies of the exam, which “hundreds of thousands of pupils” take every year, according to the BBC. Those charged with releasing exam information were sentenced to 3–15 years in prison.

The field of academic dishonesty is growing among educational professionals. As for Stephens, he is testing his ideas at six high schools in Connecticut, and may expand to 30 schools if his work is successful. He said he may even create an “anti-cheating toolkit” for schools around the nation.

Sources in this Story

Australian teachers say they are growing tired of having to play both parent and teacher in making sure kids learn about manners, hygiene, eating habits and more, according to The Daily Telegraph. In a survey, instructors reported that they wanted parents to show more initiative in teaching kids about matters like respect, good manners and punctuality. One mother told the paper that teachers have too much required of them. “There are too many things a teacher has to juggle and it is distracting them so much from the curriculum,” she said.